Since it was announced in June that The Wire's Dominic West would be headlining Showtime's The Affair, the network has been quietly building a solid cast for its drama about marital infidelity, signing Maura Tierney as West's soon-to-be-long-suffering wife, and Ruth Wilson as the also-married object of his affections.
This week the show added Fringe and Dawson's Creek alum Joshua Jackson as the fourth member of the love trapezoid. Jackson plays "a hard-edged cowboy who manages a ranch" on the bitter unforgiving prairies of… Long Island. West, Tierney, and their four kids go on vacation in that land where the buffalo roam, the Hamptons, and West and Wilson discover they have an instant connection, presumably while the deer and the antelope are off playing in the distance.
We still haven't ruled out the possibility that this is a Fringe spin-off, and this Long Island cattle ranch doesn't exist in an alternate universe—perhaps the same universe of cheating spouses where Jackson's former co-star Anna Torv will soon reside. But plot contrivance aside, the cast's pedigree, and scriptwriters from House Of Cards and In Treatment, leave us cautiously optimistic.